Europe

If one could identify a cry common to populists, it might be: "We want our country back!" Whatever may be said of populists and nationalists, they are people of the heart. They love their countries. They cherish the cultures in which they grew up. They want to retain their own unique national identities. What is wrong with that? Patriotism is central to nationalist and populist movements. Globalism is alien to them. They believe in De Gaulle's Europe of nation-states "from the Atlantic to the Urals," not in the abstract Europe of Jean Monnet, and surely not in the Brussels bureaucracy of today.

Everything Theresa May has done in mismanaging Britain’s exit from the European Union has turned to ashes. The latest public-opinion polls show her racing toward her greatest political disaster ever. An Opinium poll, published in the London Observer, shows the six-week-old Brexit Party defeating the Conservatives in a prospective general election. The Brexit Party is the brainchild of Nigel Farage, who led the referendum by which British voters said it was time to get out while the getting is good. The elites, like the elites in America, were stunned and have not yet come to terms with reality.

Notre Dame stands for so many qualities that we now lack — patience and staying power, the cultivation of beauty, a deep­religious faith, a cultural confidence and ambition that could create a timeless monument of our civilization — that the collapse of its spire was almost too much to bear. It was the work of generations, completed over the course of 300 years, in a triumph over considerable architectural and logistical challenges. Notre Dame has been thoughtfully restored and preserved over the years, to our credit. But it’s difficult not to discern a distressing message in the wanton destruction that ravaged the iconic cathedral — what prior generations so carefully and faithfully built, we are losing.

European policymakers have failed to recognize that the best way to combat totalitarian and racist ideologies, such as Nazism, and the spread of their ideas, is to let them speak freely and to disprove them in the court of public opinion. The lesson for America is: Don’t adopt totalitarian laws in an effort to stop totalitarianism.

French President Emmanuel Macron has scrapped his plan to increase the tax on diesel that so disproportionately hurts French workers. That leaves one wondering. If the future of the planet — the very life of Mother Earth, herself — hangs in the balance as these people believe, then how does Mr. Macron capitulate so easily? By his very own definition of global warming and the threat of fossil fuels such as diesel, he has agreed to murder Mother Earth with his own bare hands. Oh, well. I guess that will be only the second greatest tragedy over the past 100 years when people decided to unify Europe.

Trump sees America as a nation being milked by allies who free ride on our defense effort, as they engage in trade practices that prosper their own peoples at America's expense. Where our elites live to play masters of the universe, Trump sees a world laughing behind America's back, while allies exploit our magnanimity and idealism for their own national ends. The decisive battles between Trumpian nationalism and globalism remain ahead of us. Trump's critical tests have yet to come. And our exasperated president senses this.

The new resistance of Western man to the globalist agenda is now everywhere manifest. We see it in Trump's hostility to NAFTA, his tariffs, his border wall. We see it in England's declaration of independence from the EU in Brexit. We see it in the political triumphs of Polish, Hungarian and Czech nationalists, in anti-EU parties rising across Europe, in the secessionist movements in Scotland and Catalonia and Ukraine, and in the admiration for Russian nationalist Vladimir Putin.

Europe is rejecting, resisting, recoiling from “diversity,” the multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual future that, say U.S. elites, is America’s preordained mission to bring about for all mankind. Indeed, increasingly, the indigenous peoples of Europe seem to view as the death of their nations and continent, what U.S. liberal elites see as the Brave New World to come. To traditionalist Europeans, our heaven looks like their hell.

Though America was born of secession, the U.S. establishment since the Cold War has been far more trans-nationalist and globalist than a great champion of new nations. Perhaps that is because the New World Order proclaimed by Bush I in 1991 envisioned the U.S. as the benevolent global hegemon. Tribalism appears to be doing to the Bush New World Order what it did to Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union.

Once Europe went out to convert, colonize and Christianize the world. Now the grandchildren of the colonized peoples come to Europe to demand their share of their inheritance from a West besotted with guilt over its past sins that cannot say "No!"

A key reason for the success of Copenhagen and Amsterdam (Islamophobia alert) is that they both have shut the door, in different ways, on Islamic immigration. The door is indeed more firmly shut by the Danes who, though they are superficially the cliché UN pacifists since the days of Dag Hammarskjold, quietly say no to things that endanger their quality of life.

Here in America our church and political leaders, such as Speaker Paul Ryan and the hierarchy of Washington’s Episcopal National Cathedral, are not just allowing, but encouraging the same kind of Muslim invasion that is extinguishing European Christianity.

Ironically, Trump’s herky-jerky warnings about redefining strategic missions and meeting required contributions may jolt the alliance into reform—in a way that past American presidents’ mellifluous but empty rhetoric about the fissures within and the contradictions of NATO seem to have only made things worse.

Turkey, a powerful and reliable ally of the U.S. through the Cold War, appears to be coming unmoored from Europe and the West, and is becoming increasingly sectarian, autocratic and nationalistic. While anti-immigrant and anti-EU parties across Europe may not take power anywhere in 2017, theirs is now a permanent and growing presence, leeching away support from centrist parties left and right.

Thankfully, Donald Trump has made it known that adopting more of the policy quackery of Europe — at a time when the U.S. Has more recoverable shale oil and gas and more clean coal than any other nation on the planet — is no way to make America great again. Europe is running away from the fantasy of green energy, and this is one rare instance when America may want to follow their lead.

Montenegro is a quaint, but geopolitically irrelevant. Balkan state. If Montenegro's admission to NATO is approved by the full Senate, Americans will have yet another essentially useless defense dependent, this one a corrupt, long-time gangster state.

Donald Trump’s victory represented a rejection of Barack Obama’s America. And whether he succeeds, what is there to cause America to look back with nostalgia on the America Obama came to represent? Our Founding Fathers believed that democracy represented the degeneration of a republic; they feared and loathed it, and felt that it was the precursor of dictatorship. They may have been right again.

The European left -- lost for so many years in a blind, virtue-signaling multiculturalism -- now has to come to grips with the fact that maybe all cultures are NOT equal, that some cultures truly are racist, sexist, and homophobic and are governed by a religious ideology that seeks to rule the world with no separation of mosque and state and human rights virtually non-existent, the very things the left claims it abhors. And those same leftists don't know how to handle this contradiction. So they blame those who do and call them neo-Nazis.

Thanks in large measure to Angela Merkel, a Muslim army has successfully crossed the Mediterranean, European culture and nation-states are in full retreat, and Phase Six of the Muslim conquest of the West is well and successfully under way.

America’s fiscal position is deteriorating sharply. Earlier this year the Congressional Budget Office forecast that the federal deficit was back on the rise in 2016, with steady increases expected over the next decade. There isn’t going to be much money for the national government to spend on “discretionary” items, including underwriting wealthy allies, rebuilding failed states, and enforcing international norms.